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Verona Quartet - Online Performance
Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro, violin
Abigail Rojansky, viola and Dmitry Kousov, guest cello
Winner 2020 Chamber Music America Cleveland Quartet Award
Antonín Dvořák "American" String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96 (1893)
Reena Esmail String Quartet "Ragamala" (2013)
This concert will be approximately 1 hour in length
Immediately following the performance, stay online for a conversation hosted by Ben Cadwallader, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra with the musicians and composer, Reena Esmail.
This streaming event is presented in collaboration with Oberlin College and Conservatory.
Note - this program is subject to change without notice.
Presented by the Mannes School of Music at the College of Performing Arts.
Call +1 212.229.5873 or contact nsc@newschool.edu
The Verona Quartet is the 2020 winner of Chamber Music America’s coveted Cleveland Quartet Award. It's members have quickly gained a reputation as an “outstanding ensemble...cohesive yet full of temperament.” (The New York Times) and continue their commitment to distinguished musicianship as Oberlin College and Conservatory’s Quartet-in-Residence. The Verona Quartet has enchanted audiences across four continents at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall, Melbourne Recital Hall and others in addition to festivals such as La Jolla Summerfest, Chamber Music Northwest, Caramoor, Bravo! Vail, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The VQ also regularly collaborates with composers including Julia Adolphe, Sebastian Currier, Corey Dundee, Texu Kim and Michael Gilbertson. Having cultivated a dynamic approach to programming, the ensemble champions cross-cultural and interdisciplinary enterprises such as performances with Brooklyn’s Dance Heginbotham, Emirati poets and Grammy-winning folk group I’m With Her.
In addition to their Oberlin residency, the Verona Quartet holds positions at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance and Indiana University Summer String Academy. As Ensemble-in-Residence with the Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle in North Carolina, the VQ curates UpClose Chamber Music, a 21st century series where the visceral energy of classical music is as at home in craft breweries as it is in the concert hall. “Verona” pays homage to the great storyteller, William Shakespeare whose creations, like great music, transcend genre, time and boundaries alike.
Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, to bring communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. Esmail holds degrees from The Juilliard School and the Yale School of Music, and has written for Kronos Quartet, Albany Symphony and Conspirare. A resident of Los Angeles, Esmail is the 20-23 Swan Family Artist in Residence with Los Angeles Master Chorale, and the 20-21 Composer in Residence with Seattle Symphony. She is the Artistic Director of Shastra, a non-profit organization that promotes cross-cultural music connecting musical traditions of India and the West.
Founded at The New School in 1957 as New School Concerts, this series was renamed the Schneider Concerts in 1993 in honor of founding artistic director Alexander “Sasha” Schneider, conductor, violinist, and member of the famed Budapest String Quartet. Since 2004, it has operated under the auspices of the Mannes School of Music. The series has been guided by Frank Salomon since 1959 and administered by Rohana Elias-Reyes since 2001. Guided by music advisors John Dalley, Pamela Frank, Jaime Laredo, Cho-Liang Lin, Anthony McGill, Kurt Muroki, Tara O’Connor, and Arnold Steinhardt, the series continues Mr. Schneider’s commitment to provide early career exposure to exceptional young artists and ensembles, and offer outstanding, accessible concerts at modest ticket prices to ensure access to all. Pianist Peter Serkin, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and the Guarneri, Dover, and Calidore string quartets are among the many artists and ensembles to receive early career exposure on the series.
Ranked among the nation’s top liberal arts schools, Oberlin College and Conservatory is known for its exemplary academic and musical pedagogy and its commitment to social justice, sustainability, and creative entrepreneurship. The college, founded in 1833, holds a distinguished place among American colleges and universities as the first college to grant bachelor's degrees to women in a coeducational environment and was a leader in the education of African Americans. The conservatory of music, a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, was founded in 1865 making it the oldest continuously operating conservatory in the United States. Oberlin’s alumni enjoy illustrious careers in all aspects of the music world, achieving prominence as performers, conductors, composers, music educators, scholars, and arts administrators.
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a reputation as an “outstanding ensemble...cohesive yet full of temperament.” (The New York Times) and continue their commitment to distinguished musicianship as Oberlin College and Conservatory’s Quartet-in-Residence.
The Verona Quartet has enchanted audiences across four continents at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall, Melbourne Recital Hall and others in addition to festivals such as La Jolla Summerfest, Chamber Music Northwest, Caramoor, Bravo! Vail, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The Verona Quartet also regularly collaborates with composers including Julia Adolphe, Sebastian Currier, Corey Dundee, Texu Kim and Michael Gilbertson. Having cultivated a dynamic approach to programming, the ensemble champions cross-cultural and interdisciplinary enterprises such as performances with Brooklyn’s Dance Heginbotham, Emirati poets and Grammy-winning folk group I’m With Her.
In addition to their Oberlin residency, the Verona Quartet holds positions at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance and Indiana University Summer String Academy. As Ensemble-in-Residence with the Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle in North Carolina, the VQ curates UpClose Chamber Music, a 21st century series where the visceral energy of classical music is as at home in craft breweries as it is in the concert hall.
“Verona” pays homage to the great storyteller, William Shakespeare whose creations, like great music, transcend genre, time and boundaries alike.
“We are delighted to return to Schneider Concerts this season in a concert presented in collaboration with Oberlin College and Conservatory’s Stage Left. Although 2020 has revealed many challenges, our quartet continues to believe in the intangible and incomparable power of a musical story. Through music, we create bonds with each other no matter the distance and so we look forward to staying connected with each and every one of you through this performance, our online media and in the future, back in the live concert hall. Thank you for staying safe and being a part of this experience with us.”
At last, Beethoven felt ready to enter the weighty string quartet medium and offer his first set of quartets for publication in 1801. Interestingly, the first quartet he wrote chronologically is known to us as Op. 18 No. 3, in D Major, and this F Major Quartet, written second, was placed at the beginning of the set. Whether or not this was an intentional choice, the piece presents rather well what the rest of this set and the later works would end up featuring: a radical evolution of the quartet medium he inherited from the reins of Haydn and Mozart. This was all a product of Beethoven’s painstaking and probing working process unsurpassed by any composer before or since.
The work begins with a fragment of a melody played in unison, followed by a mysterious silence. The fragment returns, more searchingly into another silence, only to be completed in a classical phrase structure. Immediately, there is another surprise as the phrase repeats as a forte outburst. The motive that comprises the opening phrase is a monorhythm which repeats in the movement literally hundreds of times, yet much like Beethoven’s future Fifth Symphony, its effect only enhances the energy and drama of the work. The first forte outburst serves as the precursor of many sudden dynamic contrasts, the motive acting as the thread stringing the music tightly together through all upheavals.
An early draft of this quartet which Beethoven sent to his trusted friend, violinist and theologian Karl Amenda, is a unique vantage point into Beethoven’s working process and coming of age. While the overall thematic structure remains the same as in the final version, the dizzying amount of detail-oriented changes the piece underwent is shocking to compare. The most important revelation from the earlier version is Beethoven’s clear handwritten indications that the pathos-laden and dramatic slow movement is meant to correspond to the events of the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliette. With this discovery, one can only wonder if other abstract instrumental compositions of Beethoven, an ardent Shakespeare reader, were also meant to have programmatic ties. However, this is the only such example from his whole output that is explicitly stated, and Beethoven felt as though his music should speak for itself in the listener’s imagination. Even without knowing any programmatic connections, this movement would have been most striking for a listener of the era, especially with the melodramatic climaxes and painfully pronounced pauses.
Following this Adagio, the last two movements serve largely as comic relief, with an especially virtuosic violin passage in the Scherzo’s trio catapulting the energy to a feverish height. The mood returns to playfulness throughout the satisfying finale movement, culminating in a jolly bon voyage tune combined with the main theme at the close.
“Strum is the culminating result of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006. It was originally written for the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players, then arranged for string quartet in 2008 with several small revisions. In 2012 the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and the ending for the Catalyst Quartet in a performance celebrating the 15th annual Sphinx Competition.
Originally conceived for the formation of a cello quintet, the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound. Within Strum I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinati that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.”
— Jessie Montgomery
Orchestra of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the National Symphony of Ukraine, the South Bohemian Chamber Philharmonic (Czech Republic), and the Cape Town and Johannesburg Philharmonic orchestras (South Africa), to name a few.
Mr. Kouzov has performed at such prestigious venues as Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y, (New York City), Sala São Paulo (Brazil), and at the most important venues in his native Russia, including both St. Petersburg Philharmonic Halls, the halls of the Moscow and St. Petersburg Conservatories, and the Mariinsky Theater. He has appeared as a guest artist at many international festivals such as Caramoor and Kneisel Hall (USA), the Verbier and International Bach Festivals (Switzerland), the Schleswig-Holstein (Germany), “Janacek May” (Czech Republic), “Art-November”(Russia), and Kiev Summer Music Nights” (Ukraine) Festivals.
Chamber music collaborators include Joshua Bell, Yuri Bashmet, Krzysztof Penderecki, Ilya Gringolts, Shmuel Ashkenasi, and major string quartets. Special programs include the complete Brahms and Beethoven sonata cycles with long-time duo partner, pianist Peter Laul, and the complete Bach suites for unaccompanied cello.
Mr. Kouzov’s discography includes both Shostakovich concertos with the St. Petersburg State Symphony and the cello concerto by Sean Hickey on the Delos label (2013); concertos by George Walker with the Sinfonia Varsovia on the Albany label; the complete C.P.E. Bach gamba sonatas on Naxos; “Two Hundred Years of Cello Masterpieces” on Marquis; and the complete Schumann piano trios on Onyx Classics. The two of the most recent releases are French Sonatas with Peter Laul and Duos by Eisler, Widmann, and Ravel with Ilya Gringolts on Delos.
In addition to his performing activities, Mr. Kouzov is a devoted teacher and currently is an Associate Professor of Cello at the Oberlin Conservatory, and was previously on the faculties of the Juilliard School and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Thank you to our audience, Jessie Montgomery, The New School, the Schneider Concert Series, and the New England Conservatory for allowing us to perform for you today. It is a pleasure to play these works and a very special occasion to perform “Strum” by the Mannes School of Music’s newest violin and composition faculty member, Jessie Montgomery.
— Notes by the Balourdet String Quartet, except where otherwise noted.
Cho-Liang Lin was born in Taiwan. A neighbor’s violin studies convinced this 5-year old boy to do the same. At the age twelve, he moved to Sydney to further his studies with Robert Pikler, a student of Jenő Hubay. After playing for Itzhak Perlman in a master class, the 13-year old boy decided that he must study with Mr. Perlman’s teacher, Dorothy DeLay. At the age fifteen, Lin traveled alone to New York and auditioned for the Juilliard School and spent the next six years working with Ms DeLay.
A concert career was launched in 1980 with Lin’s debut playing the Mendelssohn Concerto with the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta . He has since performed as soloist with virtually every major orchestra in the world. His busy schedule on stage around the world continues to this day. However, his wide ranging interests have led him to diverse endeavors. At the age of 31, his alma mater, Juilliard School, invited Lin to become faculty. In 2006, he was appointed professor at Rice University. He is currently music director of La Jolla SummerFest and the Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival. Ever so keen about education, he was music director of the Taiwan National Symphony music camp and youth orchestra for four years.
In his various professional capacities, Cho-Liang Lin has championed composers of our time. His efforts to commission new works have led a diverse field of composers to write for him. The list includes John Harbison, Christopher Rouse, Tan Dun, John Williams, Steven Stucky, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Bright Sheng, Paul Schoenfield, Lalo Schifrin, Joan Tower and many more. Recently, he was soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Nashville Symphony and Royal Philharmonic. He is a member of the New School Concerts music advisory committee.
Lin performs on the 1715 Stradivari named “Titian” or a 2000 Samuel Zygmuntowicz. His many concerto, recital and chamber music recordings on Sony Classical, Decca, BIS, Delos and Ondine can be heard on Spotify or Naxos.com. His albums have won Gramophone Record Of The Year, Grammy nominations and Penguin Guide Rosettes.
Jessie Montgomery was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s during a time when the neighborhood was at a major turning point in its history. Artists gravitated to the hotbed of artistic experimentation and community development. Her parents – her father a musician, her mother a theater artist and storyteller – were engaged in the activities of the neighborhood and regularly brought Jessie to rallies, performances, and parties where neighbors, activists, and artists gathered to celebrate and support the movements of the time. It is from this unique experience that Jessie has created a life that merges composing, performance, education, and advocacy.
Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, ballet, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn… (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Passage (2019) a ballet commissioned by Dance Theatre of Harlem, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Caught by the Wind (2016) for the Albany Symphony and the American Music Festival.
The New York Philharmonic has selected Montgomery as one of the featured composers for their Project 19, which marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting equal voting rights in the United States to women. Other forthcoming works include a cadenza for the Brahms Violin Concerto, to be premiered by Hilary Hahn; a cello concerto for Thomas Mesa jointly commissioned by Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, and The Sphinx Organization; and a new orchestral work for the National Symphony.
A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and recent member of the Catalyst Quartet, she continues to maintain an active performance career as a violinist appearing regularly with her improvising duo Big dog little dog with bassist Eleonore Oppenheim.
Montgomery’s teachers and mentors include Sally Thomas, Ann Setzer, Alice Kanack, Joan Tower, Derek Bermel, Mark Suozzo, Ira Newborn, and Laura Kaminsky. She holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University. Montgomery is on both the composition and violin faculty at Mannes.